Essential McLuhan 76 2. New Resumes Old The A-Stone-Aged Manager Having scrapped the medieval world, the Gutenberg technology extended man’s powers of retrieval by speed-up. The medieval scriptorium had no means of coping with the whole of antiquity, but the Gutenberg press dumped all the ancient classics into the Renaissance lap. There was an orgy of paganism and miming of ancient styles of prose and dress and art. Pope, in The Dunciad, records the ultimate development of Gutenberg as a kind of supermarket abundance of books, which swamped the human intelligence and befogged the wits of men in clouds of ink. The seventeenth-century “balance” between “hardware” and “software” yielded quickly to the eighteenth-century triumph of “hardware,” familiar to every schoolboy who reads Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. William Blake, however, took an even grimmer view of the change than that expressed in the pastoral lament of the genial Irishman. U.S.A. as Laboratory for Social Experiments, Past and Present is the theme of Peter Farb’s Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State: North America is the place in the world most nearly ideal to observe the evolution of human societies and customs, institutions and beliefs, for these are revealed there with all the clarity of a scientific experiment. The story of the Indians in North America provides modern man with a living test tube, in which the major ingredients that went into the experiment, the intermediate reactions that took place, and the final results are largely known. The electrotechnic age, having rendered obsolete the age of industrial “hardware” and its organization chart, has unexpectedly retrieved the most primitive and archaic cultures of many times and places. We now are swamped by a new environment of preliterate forms. This brings us full circle on our tour with OFF-Again—ON-Again—FINN-Again There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. The extreme forms are the civilized and the tribal (eye and ear): the Cromwellian specialist and the Celtic involved. Only the civilized form is fragmented in action,